DAN HYDE: Beware the state pension lottery... it could take some time before the real winners and losers emerge

It's been five years in the making, but today the wait is over: Britain has a new state pension. It marks the biggest change in a generation to the way this country looks after older people.

When it was announced in 2011, the new state pension was sold as a bigger, fairer payment.

It would be made ‘fit for the 21st century’, ministers boasted. All you needed was 35 years of National Insurance contributions — not too onerous for someone who started work in their 20s — and an inflation-linked £155 a week awaited you in retirement. What wasn’t to like?

Sadly, as with almost all the policy tinkering by recent Labour and Tory governments, the devil is lurking in the detail.

Lottery: Official figures show just 22 per cent of people who retire this year will be any better off

It’s outrageous that it took until January this year — just three months before the reforms took effect — for the Department for Work and Pensions to publish these vital statistics.

I’ve spent the past week giving its 38 pages of mind-boggling figures and graphs a second reading. And they’ve given me a headache.

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It’s horrendously difficult to pick out clear winners and losers from the changes. What we know for certain is that the full standard weekly payment used to be £119.30 (and still is for those who have already retired) and now it’s £155.65.

But the truth is that hardly anyone will get this sum.

The official figures show just 22 per cent of people who retire this year will be any better off. In fact, the new standard payment is not really an increase at all. It just combines the mishmash of ingredients that made up the old system into a single payment.

As people hit retirement age, the state will work out whether they’d have got more or less from the old system and give them the higher amount. Typically, the difference will be marginal.

Most workers in their early 60s will be better off, but by just £4 a week on average.

They get more because they’ll keep all the state pension entitlements they’ve already accrued and will start to build up a small amount of the higher, flat-rate pension calculation over the next few years.

Those in their 50s could well benefit because they’ve even longer to build up their entitlement to the new state pension. In other words, they’ll get the best of the two pensions.

But today’s under-40s will be worse off because the Government is scrapping the generous top-ups their parents used to get. So they’ll be stuck with the worst parts of the old and new.

Rather than simply moving everyone to a new system, we’ll have two state pension systems running side by side, with nearly everyone in work today getting a bit of both. So much for making things simpler!

My fear is that it could take some time before the real winners and losers emerge from this new state pension lottery.

Shocking case

Last week I returned from a holiday in Washington DC to find a strange note in my suitcase. It was entitled ‘Notice of baggage inspection’, and had been left by the Transport Security Administration — the U.S. border police.

My bag had been opened, and its contents searched for prohibited items such as drugs, guns and so on.

Helpfully, the note added: ‘If the security officer was unable to open your bag for inspection because it was locked, the officer may have been forced to break the locks.

TSA sincerely regrets having to do this, however TSA is not liable for damage to your locks resulting from this necessary security precaution.’

Well, my bag did have a lock — and there was no sign of any damage at all. It turns out that airport police can crack the combination locks on suitcases without damaging them. There’s a special method, apparently.

I’m not sure what I find more worrying: the idea of a security official breaking into my bag and forcing me to claim a refund for the damage from my travel insurer or a criminal getting hold of this trick and making off with my belongings.

Either way, it wouldn’t hurt British Airways — with whom I flew — or other airlines to let passengers know before they get on a plane of this scant regard for locks on suitcases.